Regardless of insurance or the direct consequences for the hardware of the payload - SpaceX is aware of the rocket being not 100% reliable and has provided the possibility to terminate thrust.

The termination of thrust is the event why I initiated this thread - and you already propsed a solution.

If the Falcon's first stage doesn't break into a lot of small pieces at its "touch-down" into the ocean then it would be nothing else than a reasonable consequence to prevent even the damage of the payload in right that event.

Increased reliability should never be a reason not to look to the impacts and effects of the thrust termination in emergency, malfunction or failure. It was for this reason that I mentioned the fate of the Planetary Society's solar sails.

It would be of advantage for each technology, satellite or payload else if it would be made return to surface as intact as possible if the orbit can't be reached or a wrong orbit could be reached only.

There will be one or two points of no return which could be identified. At the highest point of no return the protection technology could be released for safe return to Earth for example.

Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

[The insurance costs I only used to summarize several consequences for the technology because I could add up them this way which can't be done by talking about the hardware directly since apples and pears would be added on then. ...]

If the Falcon's first stage doesn't break into a lot of small pieces at its "touch-down" into the ocean

Your statement has an unstated assumption that after a thrust termination abort the parachute will deploy just as it does in a normal flight. This would only be true if the abort occurs after the first stage has completed a normal burn and separated from the second stage. If thrust is terminated during the first stage burn then the parachute will not deploy and the entire rocket will crash and be destroyed.

And I do not understand the following statement:

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then it would be nothing else than a reasonable consequence to prevent even the damage of the payload in right that event.

It seems to imply that intact recovery of the first stage somehow benefits the payload, which is attached to the second stage. Please clarify your meaning.

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Increased reliability should never be a reason not to look to the impacts and effects of the thrust termination in emergency, malfunction or failure. It was for this reason that I mentioned the fate of the Planetary Society's solar sails.

I prefer to say that a payload protection system should not be used as a reason to neglect improvements in rocket reliability. Launching the solar sail on a Volna with a payload protection system would be a poor course of action. A better course of action would be to launch on a reliable rocket. Naturally the safest course of action would be to use both a payload protection system and a reliable rocket, if the weight penalty is not too high.

Also, I have a problem with your use of the phrase "look to". This statement from an earlier post

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doesn't mean that they are looking to the rockets - they simply involve the rocket into the calculations

implies that "looking to" the rocket is different from "involve the rocket". In this context these phrases both carry the same meaning as "consider" or "think about". To avoid future misunderstanding I suggest you avoid using the phrase "look to".

I am not talking about the Falcon directly - I am talking aboput a possible enhancemnet a Falcon-like rocket could have: The ability to spearte the first stage from the other stages including the payload at thrust termination. Additionaly it may be possible that all the separated components move so that they don't crash into each other.

The Falcon is only the reason to think about all this but not the subject - I am doing abstarctions because there are capabilities no rocket has yet but would be useful and advantegous.

I really don't think that the resuable first stage benefits the payload - I simply think that IF the first stage of a rcket can go down safely into the ocean at emergency termination of thrust THEN it would be a good idea to provide thsi ability to the payload also. IF there is a technology capable of this THEn apply it to the payload also.

Initiating this thread I am asking for solutions and technologies to achieve this ability.

You seem to see a hierarchical relation between payload protection and reliability - you seem to assign priorities. This I refuse here - it is not reasonable to do so if the fate of a technology, an aggregate, a satellite etc. is involved. Priorities may be reasnable and required in the development phase but not in service. The service is the delivery of a payload into an orbit - this requires reliability - but there allways is a cahnce that the service can't be completed - the payload should be kept safe then for another trial to do the service successfully.

So no priority of reliability over protection and no priority off protection over reliability - regarding the srevice. The technology should assist that. It's applied in other transportation services also.

Regadring your last issue you are wrong - I was talking about calculations and formulars not about considerations or thinking about something. Insurances use probabilities in their calculations of premiums but not data about rockets. Data about vehicles - regardless of that being rockets, airplanes or cars - are used for other purposes - to decide if they insure soemthing at all or refuce to do that or to make the customer to use a special vehicle. But all that isn't a calculation of premiums.

But a sI already said - my talk about insurance in this thread onyl is a tool not a subject.

In the SpaceX-Sticky in the Latest News section Sigurd posted this - among other very completing informations - :

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And Kimbal notes: Quote:

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The team is on Omelek collecting debris.

The rocket impacted on a dead reef about 250 ft away from the launch pad, so most of it is recoverable for analysis.

Amazingly, the satellite was thrown high into the air when the rocket impacted and came crashing down through the roof of our machine shop, landing mostly intact on the floor! One helluva' return trip.

The hole in the machine shop roof is the only significant damage to the island.

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Thank You Very Much for providing that the complete Whole of as much informations as possible is considered in that thread, Sigurd.

This should or at least could be one concrete reason to take into account the protection of payloads in emergency.

If the satellite would have had a parachute or a protection then that poster - don't remember this moment who it was - who mentioned that the satellite perhaps can't be used nomore although being mostly intact - that poster wouldn't see that much reason for new construction of the satellite.

Obviously the failure happened in a manner eleasing the satellite from the second stage. Perhaps a mechanism and software could be found to open the second stage in emergency and to eject the payload attached to aparachute.

If someone can devise a way for economically protecting the payload then I'd be all for it.

However, I'd then question, wouldn't that money have been better spent testing the booster to make sure it didn't go boom? Isn't spending money on payload protection is kind of like saying you don't trust the booster? If that were the case, why launch. Having said that, a certain amount of risk is assumed and booster track records are about 1 in 50 for some sort of non-nominal performance.

A good candidate for payload protection, are the nuclear payloads.

Take for example, Pluto New Horizons. Its RTG hung out the side of the spacecraft, which in-turn was sitting on-top of a Star-48(?) solid rocket motor. Not much in between the upper stage and the RTG. Thus, a bad burn thru on the solid rocket motor could catastrophically damage the RTG, releasing some quantity of plutonium. This would need to happen in the first 50 seconds or so to affect people, as it would otherwise become orbital.

Still, it is interesting to hear that the payload landed on terra-firma. I'd personnally junk the thing (or use it as a teaching tool for future engineers).

what I have in mind is to add payload protection or payload safety to the list - this doesn't mean that I want this aspect to be the only point on the list or on top of the list.

Protection and/or safety of payload should be added to the list and have a similar weight as other aspects - similar weight like making sure that the booster deosn't explode or that the FTS doesn't need to terminate the flight.

It never will be 100% sure that the FTS doesn't need to terminate or that the booster deosn't explode.

I can imagine at least two ways of payload protection or safety. Additionally there have been and will be payloads of significantly different wieghts - and the weight is of meaning for the weight of the protection or safety equipment: For a lighter payload the equipment may be lighter, for a heavier paylaod another equipment or weight might have to be choosen and for heaviest payloads there might be no proper or economical protection or saftey equipment.

In short - there will be economical protection or safety equipments and technologies as well as uneconomical ones - and which of them is economical or uneconomical will differe from payload to payload.

If the protection or safety equipment is removable it may be up to the customer to decide if he wnats the equipment/technology to be applied or not. The equipment might be reusable which would tend to increase the economicality.

Next - and very essential and important also - there is a price to be payed to SpaceX and other private companies offering launches - it might be possible that they get more customers and can charge higher prices if they offer the application of protection or safety equipment or provide them. And the difference between price and costs might be larger than without protection/safety equipment - increasing the raw profit, amount of coverage.

To answer questions for economicality of such equipments it is required to be creative to find as much different protection/safety technologies and equipments as possible. It may assist the future evolution of sapceflight and especially private spaceflight.

This all isn't menat tgha economical but it is meant to ease private work on technologies, development efforst, construction, entrepreneurship in space technologies and much more.

I don't disagree. I'd just like to see a viable system that people would have enough confidence in to want to reuse a payload that just went through hell. I'm not saying that it can't be done, even economically, it's just you'd have to prove to me that it works first before I'd just dust off the payload and put it back on a new booster.

What about encasing payloads in boxes made of "Wurtzit-Bornitrid" or Lonsdaleite? The first is by 18% harder than diamond, the second by 58%.

An article under www.wissenschaft.de tells this and says explicitly that the hardness of the materials means that they might be used as layers of space vehicles. For this reason it seems to me that they also might break not that easyly if they crash into something themselves.